Assembly poised to pass overdue state budget

Proposal faces block in Senate

MADISON - After a round of last-minute negotiations and tough talk, the state Assembly was poised late Wednesday to pass a two-year budget that would delay road projects in Milwaukee and inject new money into public and private schools across the state.

At least five conservative senators are blocking a budget vote in the Senate for now, but their Assembly colleagues gave them no concessions — even as Gov. Scott Walker backed at least some changes to win over those holdouts.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) said he wouldn’t be “held hostage” to demands from individual Republican senators, renewing doubts about whether the GOP can resolve differences over the budget.

“We are not making wholesale changes to appease one senator with additional budget requests,” Vos said at a news conference.

Republicans who control the Assembly adopted a short budget amendment Wednesday ahead of final passage, but it did not include the kinds of concessions that Senate conservatives have been seeking. A final vote was expected by midnight.

Earlier, Walker tried to keep the budget on track by endorsing at least some of the conservative senators’ demands, such as moving up the repeal date of a minimum wage for workers on public infrastructure projects.

“I’m still confident we’ll have a budget by the end of the summer that will … balance the interests of investing more dollars in K-12 education than ever before and lowering property taxes,” Walker told reporters in a conference call from a trade mission to South Korea.

Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) hopes to take up the budget in his house Friday and wants to avoid making any changes that would send it back to the Assembly, said his spokeswoman, Myranda Tanck.

The budget was supposed to be done by July 1, but Republicans who run the Legislature missed that deadline because of disagreements over transportation and taxes. State funding has been continuing at levels set in the last budget until a new plan is approved.

The Legislature’s budget committee reached a fragile deal last week that leaders hope will get the spending plan onto Walker’s desk. But some Senate conservatives say they want to see spending reductions and changes to how the Department of Transportation operates.

The budget would spend $75.7 billion and provide for 70,395 state employees.

At the start of the next 2019-’21 budget, the bill would leave a nearly $1 billion gap between the level of taxes and the level of spending written into state law. Though substantial, the projected shortfall is smaller than the typical amount over the past two decades, according to the Legislature’s nonpartisan budget office.

The budget would raise fees on hybrid and electric cars and borrow $402 million for transportation infrastructure, far less than included in recent budgets. The plan would delay work on Highway 15 in Outagamie County and the north leg of the Zoo Interchange in Milwaukee County and put off the reconstruction of I-94 between the Zoo and Marquette interchanges.

The budget includes $5 million for both the St. Ann Center for Intergenerational Care in Milwaukee and a science and technology center in Green Bay as well as a $4 million earmark for a tiny Wisconsin Rapids airport that has seen a boost in private jets since a Republican donor’s golf course opened nearby.

School funding

The budget includes $639 million for K-12 education. Schools would see: » An additional $200 per student this school year; $204 on top of that the following year; and up to $125 for each ninthgrader to pay for laptops or other electronics.

» Increases for districts that spend the least on their students — currently around $9,100 per student in state aid and local property taxes. Under the budget, districts could raise a minimum of $9,300 per student — a figure that would eventually rise to $9,800.

The budget would expand taxpayer-funded vouchers for religious and other private schools to allow roughly 800 more students into those programs.

Families that have incomes of up to 220% of the federal poverty level, or about $45,000 for a family of three, would qualify for the statewide voucher program outside of Milwaukee and Racine. That’s up from 185% of the poverty level currently.

The budget would eliminate the state’s $89 million property tax used for forestry programs. Overall, taxes on the median value home worth $160,600 would remain flat this year at $2,851 and then would drop $22 next year, according to the Legislature’s nonpartisan budget office.

The budget would also reduce local property taxes on business machinery and use $74 million in state tax money to backfill the cut.